Introduction – How VDI is helping businesses to work efficiently in COVID-19 Situation

COVID-19 is not only affecting the health and population of, but also the economy of the entire world. Remote working has increased exponentially recently. The complete Silicon Valley has been facing disruptive effects of the coronavirus with thousands of employees been asked to work remotely from their homes. Fortunately, coronavirus remote-work policies have introduced many solutions for the employees and IT staff of various organizations for an effective transition in telecommunication.

Many enterprises have remote-access solutions like VPN, but some software does not work well over VPN connections. VDI solutions allow virtual desktop for users, but the infrastructure investment can be costly. However, by leveraging certain cloud-based services such as Azure, VDI can guarantee remote secured access to the users. Employees and staff can now seamlessly connect over a web portal from anywhere in the world with in-place Internet connectivity.

Statistics of Amazon Workspaces Used by Businesses

As of now, there is an analysis made on 258 enterprises currently using Amazon WorkSpaces. Most of these enterprises are located in the United States and belong to the Computer Software industry. Companies with several employees more than 10,000 and an income revenue of more than 100 million dollars are using Amazon WorkSpaces most often. Amazon WorkSpaces share 0.1% of the total market share among all the other Virtualization platforms such as VMware Sphere, Microsoft Hyper-V Server, and few others.

Distribution of Companies using Amazon Workspaces by Revenue:

Distribution of Companies using Amazon Workspaces by Company Size:

In terms of the types of industries using Amazon WorkSpaces, recent data analysis suggests that Amazon WorkSpaces customers are highest in the Computer Software industry (27%), Financial Services (7%), Information Technology, and Services (7%). 72% of Amazon WorkSpaces customers belong to the United States and 8% belong to the United Kingdom.

What is Amazon WorkSpaces?

Amazon WorkSpaces is a secure and managed Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution. You can provision Windows or Linux desktops through Amazon WorkSpaces in just a few seconds. You can also scale to offer thousands of desktops to workers across the world. You can launch your WorkSpaces and can pay hourly and monthly for the same. It saves money when compared to the traditional desktops and on-premises VDI solutions. You can manage OS versions, patches, and hardware inventory in a simple manner. Your users can experience a fast and responsive desktop that can be accessed anytime from anywhere, using a supported device.

How to setup Amazon WorkSpaces?

Amazon Workspaces Quick Setup performs the below-given tasks:

• Creates an IAM role to enable the Amazon WorkSpaces service to build elastic network interfaces and display your WorkSpaces directories.
• Builds a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).
• Sets up a Simple AD Directory in the VPC. It is used to store WorkSpace and User information.
• Creates the specified user accounts and adds them to the Simple AD Directory.
• Creates WorkSpaces where each of them obtains a public IP address to provide Internet access.

Below described are the steps to set up Amazon WorkSpaces:

1. Launch the WorkSpace using Quick Setup: Open the Amazon WorkSpaces console using the URL and then choose ‘Get Started Now’. Choose ‘Launch’ next to ‘Quick Setup’, on the WorkSpaces page.
2. Connect to the Amazon WorkSpace using any client of your choice.
3. You can customize your newly created WorkSpace as per your requirements. For instance, installing software and performing several administrative tasks.

Top 7 Benefits of Using Amazon Workspaces

You can avail of the following seven substantial benefits from the cloud-based capabilities of Amazon WorkSpaces:

• Decreased costs:

WorkSpace users need not invest in buying hardware and software and spend less on deploying, maintaining, and upgrading them.

• Simple management of desktop resources:

Amazon WorkSpaces does not require configuring a desktop in real-time. It comes with all inbuilt features to perform this task.

• Ensured security:

Amazon WorkSpaces is distributed within VPC providing users access to encrypted storage volumes with no data loss. Sensitive information can be accessed now safely via free WiFi or any network.

• Deployment made easy without licensing hassles:

Users can create WorkSpaces using multiple operating systems with licenses covered.

• Work with desktops on several devices:

Amazon WorkSpaces maintains a multiplicity of devices. Users need to download the client software and work on the device of their choice.

• Centralized management of desktop deployment:

Enterprises can handle the global deployment of thousands of WorkSpaces using AWS console.

• Offer an existing server remotely to the employees:

Companies can integrate their server infrastructure with Amazon WorkSpaces keeping the authentication protocols and permissions intact for the users to access resources from anywhere smoothly.

AWS Step Functions & Simplifying Workflow: Features, Use Cases & Verdict

How is AWS helping businesses to go server-less?

AWS has brought up a server-less feature for running applications without thinking about servers. You can develop more agile applications to ensure scalability and reliability using server-less practices, services, and strategies. AWS manages patching and capacity provisioning to focus on writing code that will best serve and help our clients. AWS Lambda is one of the eminent server-less services with features of in-built high availability, automatic scaling, and a pay-for-value billing model.

From small startups to large enterprises, financial institutions to government agencies, AWS clients are adopting server-less technology to save money, innovate faster and efficiently and serve their customers. AWS server-less customers connect to thousands of concurrent users across platforms, scale effortlessly to handle aggressive traffic during flash sales, and ensure overall reliability.

Conclusion:

We can conclude from the blog that opting for a server-less feature with Amazon WorkSpaces is doing a great benefit to enterprises and businesses. While companies have been leveraging over VDI for over a decade now, many enterprises have already adopted Amazon WorkSpaces to provision desktops for their users seamlessly.

Amazon WorkSpaces offer AD services along with scalability. It is a fully managed and cost-effective pay-as-you-go model requiring less or no large infrastructure investment. It ensures network security with strict inbound and outbound rules from integration with Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

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